Published in 1937, twelve years before Orwell's 1984, Swastika Night projects a totally male-controlled fascist world that has eliminated women as we know them. Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”

"Swastika Night goes beyond the specifics of Nazi ideology to a nightmare world in which men are valued for their brutality and violence and women are regarded only as degraded breeders. The real nightmare is how closely these underlying views conform to conventional contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity. Thanks to the Feminist Press for bringing us this brilliant, chilling dystopia, written under a male pseudonym and demonstrating once more that Anonymous was a woman." —Ann J. Lane, author of To Herland and Beyond

Katharine Burdekin (1896-1963) wrote under the name Murray Constantine, and published more than ten novels before her death. Her dystopian novel Swastika Night (1937) was reissued by the Feminist Press in 1985.